Neurable unveiled its very own pair of brain-scanning headphones on Thursday, the Neurable One. The company claims that wearing them helps you concentrate on whatever you’re doing—working, studying, or playing a video game.
When I spoke to Neurable earlier this year, the company said it planned to license its brain-scanning technology to power a flood of gadgets that were ready to enter the market. But it decided to launch its own hardware first.
“We wanted to take the product in-house,” Ramses Alcaide, Neurable’s cofounder and CEO, tells WIRED. “There were a lot of areas where we wanted to improve the product, and we wanted to move at a much faster rate. It also puts a little more capability for us to be able to show off what’s possible with the technology.”
The Boston company has until now relied on other brands to showcase its brain-scanning technology in their products, all of which promise to help people improve focus and provide data about your brain activity in a companion app. It began a few years ago by building its tech into some Master & Dynamic headphones. At the start of this year, Neurable showed off a gaming headset with HP's HyperX featuring two electroencephalography (EEG) sensors built in.
Like the original M&D MW75 Neuro headphones, the Neurable One features 12 EEG sensors in the nylon earpads that are used to monitor brain waves. The headphones cost $499 and will be available in October from Neurable’s website.
The EEG sensors live in the specially designed earpads.
Courtesy of NeurableAlongside the new headphones is a new app (the old app will continue to exist for now for older hardware), which Alcaide says tracks eight brain metrics:
- Brain Age: Tracks your brain’s perceived age against your real age.
- Brain Battery: What you have left in reserve.
- Speed: How quickly you process information.
- Focus: How well your attention is holding.
- Load: How much effort you spend doing the task.
- Stress: How much tension you have doing the task.
- Sleepiness: How far you are drifting toward sleep.
- Alpha Peak Frequency: Your strongest resting rhythm, which Neurable claims is like the brain's heart rate variability.
The biggest hardware and software change with the Neurable One is that you no longer have to start a session in the app to capture brain activity. Instead, the Neurable One passively monitors your brain as soon as you put the headphones on—Alcaide likens it to wearing a Fitbit.
At that point, the sensors begin monitoring your brain activity to measure your focus. When it detects that you’re getting distracted, the headphones play a ping to get you back on track. If it thinks you're burning out instead, it’ll recommend a break so you can come back later fully recharged.
The headphone-app combo works similarly to help you fall asleep and to meditate. For example, with meditation, you can follow a guided session, and when the headphones detect you’re in the flow, the guide will stop talking so you stay in that zone. If it detects you’re drifting away, it’ll start guiding you back again. For sleep—designed for naps rather than proper bedtime—it can, over time, lower the headset volume of guided naps or soundscapes as it detects you falling asleep. (You can also turn off the EEG sensors and just use them as regular headphones if you want.)
Alcaide says when the app tells him his brain battery is low for the day, he’ll go to the sauna and go to bed early to help him recover. It can tell him when his peak brain speed hours are, allowing him to rejigger his schedule so he does his hardest work during those times. There’s also a check-in system called Cognitive Snapshot; when you trigger it, the app shows your current brain state and offers recommendations to improve it. That could be a guided meditation or small games to exercise those parts of your brain. The app also provides weekly or monthly reports to track your brain activity over time.
Neurable doesn’t have any new research or data to share that can speak to the effectiveness of its latest headphones. That research is in the works, but it will take time. So Neurable still points to previous research with the Mayo Clinic, which showed a 30 percent increase in focus in individuals using Neurable's headset versus people using Pomodoro techniques or other types of focus-sustaining systems. The study also saw a drop of about 10 percent in end-of-day burnout and an increase in end-of-day happiness.
Courtesy of NeurableThe product isn’t categorized as a medical device, and Neurable says it isn’t designed to diagnose, treat, or monitor any conditions. The company also promises not to sell any of the data it collects about your brain—which could become very valuable in the future—and says it doesn't use that data for advertising. Alcaide says enterprise customers buy its headsets in bulk to help employees focus, but they’re not buying the headsets to monitor the workforce.
“It's because we know we're going to get higher productivity per employee; they're going to be happier, they're going to feel less burned out, it's a win-win for everybody,” he says. “It's like how sometimes companies get gym memberships for their employees.” He stresses that each user’s data stays with them.
Alcaide says the company partnered with an audio brand to help with the non-brain-scanning bits of the hardware, though he wouldn’t share the name. These cans have the “same premium sound” as the earlier M&D collaboration, with 40-mm beryllium drivers, six microphones, active noise cancellation, a transparency mode, and 22 hours of run time—12 if you have those EEG sensors running. It supports Bluetooth 5.2, and both AAC and aptX codecs. Neurable’s app is available on both Android and iOS.
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